Inside Rakuten’s retail media evolution: How Symbiosys and Mirakl power a unified flywheel
Retail media is now table stakes for modern retailers.
But unlocking its full potential requires more than just ads on a product page. It demands a flywheel: a virtuous cycle where marketplaces, advertising and shopper experience amplify one another.
Rakuten’s retail media evolution offers a blueprint for how this can work and what kind of infrastructure it takes to power it.
This blog recaps highlights from a Mirakl Mornings session at Cannes, where Rakuten France Head of Partnerships and Advertising Kristina Raptovaia, Symbiosys Founder and CEO Bashar Kachachi, and Mirakl Ads VP, Sales Anne Hallock, discussed how their collaboration is fueling a more connected, performant retail media ecosystem.
From manual beginnings to unified monetization
Rakuten France began investing in retail media in 2013, well ahead of most other players in the industry.
The initial offering was simple: a homegrown, keyword-based ad system that let sellers promote their products manually.
Over time, Rakuten layered on additional technologies to improve relevance and advertiser experience, but these additions created fragmentation. Fill rates lagged, budgets went unspent and managing campaigns across platforms became inefficient.
The turning point came when Rakuten realized it needed a unified platform that could serve both marketplace sellers and external brands through a single engine. That led to a new partnership model with Mirakl Ads and Symbiosys, designed to connect every component of the flywheel.
Symbiosys and the power of full-funnel activation
One of Rakuten’s biggest challenges was activating media budgets beyond the bottom of the funnel.
While on-site sponsored placements are great for conversion, they’re limited in scale and often can’t absorb the full demand from merchants and brands. That’s where Symbiosys stepped in.
As an off-site retail media partner, Symbiosys helps Rakuten extend its shopper reach across platforms like Google, Meta and TikTok, using Rakuten’s first-party data.
This enables full-funnel engagement, from awareness to consideration to conversion, while reducing Rakuten’s customer acquisition costs and driving more high-quality traffic to the marketplace.
Everyone benefits, from shoppers seeing relevant offers earlier in their journey, to sellers getting more sales, and Rakuten boosting performance across the board.
Mirakl as the flywheel’s connective infrastructure
Behind it all is Mirakl’s marketplace technology.
With Mirakl Ads, Mirakl’s platform goes beyond simply enabling marketplace monetization to connect seller catalogs, shopper behavior and advertising demand into a single decisioning engine. This is what allowed Rakuten to nearly double its ad response rate in a side-by-side test against its previous provider.
The key lies in intelligent automation.
Mirakl’s AI-based system matches products to placements based on shopper signals, campaign goals and keyword relevance in real time.
That means higher fill rates, better CTRs, and less manual work for retailers and advertisers alike.
As Rakuten’s Kristina Raptovaia put it, “You really need the ads you show to be pertinent.” That same need led them to Mirakl, which delivered a shopper experience that felt more helpful and intuitive, with ads that enhanced the journey rather than interrupting it.
The next chapter of retail media
Rakuten’s journey shows what’s possible when retailers break down silos and build for interconnected growth.
Marketplaces supply the assortment, advertising drives monetization and a better shopper experience feeds conversion and loyalty.
But none of this works without the right infrastructure. Mirakl Ads’ AI-powered retail media technology allows advertisers to automate campaigns and propose the best product for shoppers across the funnel.
Learn more about how retail media has disrupted the eCommerce flywheel here, or download the Rakuten case study to read more about their success with Mirakl.
Case Study Download: How Rakuten France surged ad responses by 83% with Mirakl Ads
